Retail: How to drive growth with advanced analytics

Retailers are becoming increasingly data-driven and digitally savvy: for those who are yet to adopt advanced analytics, it’s not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when.' Failing to do so results in difficult times ahead, purely because they won’t be able to leverage predictive customer insight for new opportunities and growth that analytics can yield.

Organisations who are able to draw analytics intelligence at a faster rate than competitors can provide improved customer experience, innovate and react to the ever-evolving consumer needs at greater speed. Laggards put their businesses at risk by not embracing the opportunities of advanced analytics. We commonly see the most successful retailers empowering data and analytics to achieve a multitude of business benefits. These include:

Improved targeted marketing

Data exists in masses for retailers to use, including online and sensor data. Competitive retailers’ IT departments are effectively gathering and organizing data now to make it accessible to the data scientists, analysts, marketers and other business-focused roles involved in delivering customer insights in real-time for the common goal of boosting revenue.

A large number of retailers have achieved a 360-degree customer view real-time analytical environment, which is providing them with a deeper level of insight used to enable analytics-driven targeting, resulting in increased revenue opportunities.

Empowered growth

The assessment of analytics capability is crucial to the initial stages of any analytics programme. The most innovative retailers know that, in addition to identifying technical gaps, it’s also essential to consider whether your analytics strategy is aligned with your business goals and whether sufficient operational and governance capabilities are in place.

These forward-thinking companies are continually adapting analytic capabilities to meet evolving needs while continuing to develop highly efficient solutions. By doing so, retailers have scalable analytics programmes that can adjust as they grow, driving better results and profitability.

Ability to meet ever-evolving customer needs

With advanced analytics, retailers can understand changing customer profiles more clearly, especially those surrounding online buying behavior around vital retail events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They are learning that developing a personalized online shopping experience is key to driving sales: ‘recommended products’ by Amazon is a good example of a data-driven customer targeting strategy.

Analytics-driven insight is demonstrating how customer buying behavior has evolved, resulting in a shift from in-store purchasing to shopping online: a Shop.org survey, retail executives were asked where most of their 2017 technology investments would be: 39% chose mobile, while just 6% selected in-store.

With increased visibility into device usage via analytics, retailers can identify different customers in terms of shopping behavior, such as customers who only react to offers. Retailers can then tailor personalized targeting built into their websites in real-time so that, for example, offers are just pushed to sale-seekers of their customer base, leading to improved conversion rate and increased revenue.

What does the future hold?

Beyond shopping online at home, smart appliances will soon be able to use analytics to predict and accommodate consumer needs. Connected fridges are a crucial example of fast-evolving retail analytics in use: these appliances can already tell users what to include on their shopping lists, and even automatically order these groceries to the front door without permission having to be granted.

Retailers must act now to achieve analytics-driven success. Laggards will be unable to leverage the predictive insight that advanced analytics can yield, critical to driving business benefits and thus surviving in an increasingly digitalized industry.

(Author):

Katarina Hansson

Katarina Hansson leads the Retail Industry unit of Teradata International. In this position, she provides the strategic link between the Teradata product portfolio and the retail customers’ business challenges and requirements.

She is a frequent conference speaker on retail innovation and retail business development topics, and her advice on how to improve business through analytics is appreciated by leading retailers in Europe and Asia.

Before Katarina Hansson joined Teradata in November 2012, she had worked in merchandising, store operations and accounting at H&M and held different sales and marketing management positions at Ikea. At Ikea Denmark, she executed a long-term strategy to improve the company’s market position. After 3 years, the market perception was changed and Ikea had increased its market share significantly. When she was Deputy Sales Manager at Ikea Sweden, she changed the way Ikea Sweden worked with store relevance, range optimization, strategic pricing and competitor analytics. As the Ikea Family Manager, she introduced a customer-centric, analytics-based way to communicate with loyal customers, which incrreased store traffic, average sales slip and customer satisfaction alike. In her role as Marketing Manager of Ikea Home Shopping Nordics, she established an e-commerce platform and omni-channel marketing activities to improve the customer interaction.

Katarina Hansson completed her studies at Lund University in Sweden where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration and Economics, a Master of Education degree as well as a European diploma in Marketing.